We are excited to see all of the Halloween costumes tomorrow! Our annual Halloween parade will be at 9 a.m., but the remainder of the day will be fairly normal. We have reminded our students of the following guidelines throughout this week:
- Costumes should not be too scary and cannot include any weapons.
- Students are able to wear masks for the parade and at recess, but other than that they must remove any masks and/or hoods.
- Halloween candy should not be brought to school. We did say they could bring a piece to enjoy as part of their dessert at lunch. Any other excessive candy will be donated to the third grade’s Treats for Troops candy drive (see below). We encouraged students to bring in any of the candy they do not like to donate to the cause!
Treat our troops to a sweet treat! The third grade is partnering with Soldiers’ Angels Treats for Troops Program to ship donated candy to deployed service members around the world. Please drop off any candy (including extra Halloween candy!) to a third grade classroom, the Falcon’s Nest, the LS front desk, or with Mrs. Walsh in the US. We are collecting until November 5th.
Please do not forget to click on “Links and Resources” at the top of this page. Here you will find the folder which has all of the photos we take throughout the year. Check back often, as we will continue to upload photos all year!
Here’s what is going on in our classes this week:
Reading: This week, the students will be completing Part 1 of Holes, which will require a bit more reading than we’ve done in the previous weeks. That said, I’m confident the students will be more than capable of handling the volume and turning their experiences into various creative products.
By the end of the week, the students will have to choose three of seven possible assignment prompts to respond to, ranging from rewriting a scene/chapter from another character’s perspective to visualizing and articulating similarities between our main antagonist, The Warden, and other characters they’ve encountered in other texts.
As the students are reading and working independently, I’ll be facilitating small group discussions to help gauge comprehension of the main narrative and our handling of the literary devices relevant to our work with Holes, primarily theme, characterization, and symbolism. The work we do this week will culminate and help prepare the students for a Part 1 quiz early next week.
History: We’re so glad that so many of you were able to join us for a great field trip this past Friday. With their Landmark Essays and Presentations in the rear view, the final part of their projects will be to complete a short reflective essay outlining various aspects of their experience preparing for and participating in the trip.
This is a much shorter, low-stakes form of writing than their research essays, so expect your student to have this completed by the end of the week. That said, the skills and benefits of reflective writing should not be understated–allowing the students to step back, think about their subjective experiences, and articulate those thoughts into ways to improve or guide their future work will be paramount as we continue on through the year.
Math: While some students are still working on long division, overall we are really focusing on problem solving this week. Word problems always tend to be a tricky area for many students. Of course it is important for students to be able to compute efficiently and accurately, but it is crucial they are able to do this beyond “naked math problems” (as one of my former college professors called them). The world is made of problems full of curve balls that take a lot of thinking to navigate. It is a mission of mine to help every student become a flexible thinker, capable of tackling whatever problem life throws at them- mathematically or otherwise.
Science: With the incredible landmark field trip behind us, we have finally begun our first science unit! We are diving a little deeper than students have before into the scientific method. We will quickly review the six steps of the scientific process, and then move on to writing a testable question and hypothesis. Friday we are looking forward to our first lab! Students will put their learning to the test as they investigating the effect of activity on their heart rates.
Have a great rest of the week and weekend! Don’t forget to turn your clocks back Saturday night!
Kimberly & Tim